I'm even too confused to come up with a good title for this post

A Changed Man, a novel by Francine Prose, bothered me.

First I have to admit, I knew it was going to bother me from the get go. I couldn't get into the style of the novel's language. It wasn't that the style was ever bad, rather, that it never sang, for me. I was trying to separate style from content for much of the time I spent reading the book. That's not really the best way to read a book, because ultimately the style affects the way we read the story. I mean, it is the way we read the story. And, stylistically, here, the novel felt like thin paint: color, sure, but no real depth.

What made this problem for me a bit more difficult was that the third person narrator remained basically the same, no matter which character's perspective was being presented. Sure, the words changed, but the mode of the language itself never seemed to do so. Like the narrator picked up specific key words appropriate to the individual characters' perspectives, but wasn't entirely sure how to use them, to develop the voice around them that would make for convincing transitions and compelling voice.

The fact that, about a small chunk of pages prior to the halfway point, I took a quick look at some of the reviews for the book didn't much help matters for me, either. Even glancing down the blurbs that Metacritic extracted from the reviews is enough to see a common notion: that the book is satire, that it's supposed to be wickedly, darkly humorous. The fact that I was nearly halfway through the book and I hadn't laughed once had me wondering if everyone else had it wrong, or if I just wasn't getting it. I spent the rest of the book looking for humor where I probably wouldn't have found it before. And though I guess I saw it, maybe was able to pick it out of the lineup, I couldn't help but hang on to my perhaps naive notion that this book wasn't meant to be satire, but essentially realist.

There's a few reviews out there that, I think, make me feel less bad about not finding the book funny, and also, in retrospect, also point my way out of this morass of negatives and towards the positives. Take, for instance:

The novel has been touted as a biting satirical work of fiction; "mercilessly funny" and a "brilliant new comic novel" say the critics, but as far as I can see, the comedy just barely bubbles beneath the surface. It's an interesting story, and that's about it.

- PopMatters Book Review

And:

Francine Prose is often referred to as a satirist, but that label is more an artifact of our age than an accurate description of her work. Prose's new novel, "A Changed Man," features a quasi-reformed neo-Nazi as its protagonist, more or less, along with a rich and self-absorbed Holocaust survivor who runs a global do-gooder organization called World Brotherhood Watch, a multitasking 40-ish soccer mom who's barely holding her life together, and a handsomely tailored African-American talk-show host who's part Oprah and part Phil Donahue. Throw in the sexy Latina New York Times reporter, the Holocaust survivor's Viennese-aristocrat wife and the mouthy teenager who shocks his school by writing a paper suggesting that Hitler might have been gay, and yeah, it does sound like we're in the realm of larger-than-life Tom Wolfe pastiche.

The thing is, we're not. Does any of that sound even slightly implausible? If "A Changed Man" is satire, then so are lots of other things, including "Anna Karenina," "Middlemarch" and "Our Mutual Friend." I'm not suggesting that this novel is playing quite in that league, but I am suggesting that Prose is striving for the same kind of large-scale social portraiture, and that her desire to capture contemporary Americans, with all their internal contradictions, solipsism and general screwed-upness, is guided more by the spirit of compassion than by that of mockery.

- Salon

What I'm getting at here, is that, despite everything negative about the book I've tossed out here, I was still intrigued and compelled to finish the novel, to find out what happens to the characters. In fact, I actually kind of cared for them, even if I was alternately unconvinced and unintrigued by them. ("...more by the spirit of compassion than by that of mockery.") I wanted to know how things were going to work out, which often drove me to wish the novel would get to the working-out part a little bit quicker ("Unfortunately, as the novel progresses, one can’t help feeling that the ride would have been twice as enjoyable, and infinitely more bracing, if it had been half as long." - L.A. Weekly). When there is a rather climactic moment near the end of the book, I actually felt bad. (I think I literally said, "Aw, no, why'd you have to do that?" out loud, and I wasn't talking to the author--I was talking to the character in question.)

So, when I say that the book bothered me, it wasn't a question of content, or ideas, or anything like that; it was probably more the act of reading the book, of being torn in multiple directions at once--wanting to put it down so that the language style would stop having the chance to infect my own writing, wanting to keep reading through to the end because the characters weren't so bad and almost kind of likeable. Not to mention the sudden revelation mid-way through that I might be reading the book different from everyone else, or, perhaps, even, wrongly altogether. All things added up, I just feel weird about the whole thing.

Like I've said a billion times already, I'm no pro book reviewer, I'm just some guy who reads stuff and tries not to diss on stuff without good cause. In general, I'm as much interested in giving you, faithful reader, a picture of me reading the book as I am in giving you a picture of the book itself. In this case, though, maybe the experience of the experience became a bit too much for my usual taste. I really could go on for much longer, but then I'll just get incoherent, which, of course, I usually am anyways, so, you know, right-o, move along.